Copyright

Most of the electronic resources available at the lab are copyrighted by someone and governed by license agreements. These legal agreements determine how an electronic resource can or cannot be used.

Appropriate Use

It is the responsibility of individual users to ensure that laboratory resources are used for:

Research

Educational and scholarly purposes

Personal non-commercial use

The following applies to electronic resources that are copyrighted/governed by Los Alamos National Laboratory license agreements (other restrictions may apply):

You may:

Print or download individual articles, chapters, or other items on a limited basis.

Send an article or item to another authorized user

Link to articles or other items from a publishers website (recommended method for providing electronic content)

You may not:

Systematically download, save, print, or distribute large amounts of information (eg download all articles from a journal issue; engage in large-scale downloading from licensed resources to create databases)

Send an article or item to a person who is not an authorized user (unless this is specifically allowed by a publisher's license)

Post an article or other items in any open environment, including the Internet (includes mailing lists, electronic bulletin boards, blogs, etc)

What are "Fair Use" options?

Fair Use provisions of US copyright law allow reproduction and distribution of copyrighted materials on a limited basis for specific purposes without the permission of the copyright holder. In order for Fair Use to apply, the reproduction and distribution must be for the noncommercial purposes of scholarship, research or education (among others).

Fair Use is a limited right. It generally means you cannot reproduce or distribute large portions of a book or multiple articles from the same issue of a journal. A reasonable interpretation of the law is one (1) article per issue of a journal, and one-tenth or one chapter of book, whichever is greater. Use beyond this allowance requires payment of copyright royalty fees to the publisher.

Ideally, you should keep copyrights and transfer limited rights to the publisher. If the publisher's copyright transfer agreement does not state the author's rights to publish or reproduce the accepted manuscript (final peer-reviewed and accepted) version of the work, the author may choose to request that the following statement be added to the agreement:

"This work has been authored by an employee of Los Alamos National Security, LLC, operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting this work for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce this work, or allow others to do so for United States Government purposes."

Publishers are not required to accept this change to the copyright transfer agreement, and may reject it. However, the government and author rights to publish or reproduce the accepted manuscript (AM) version of the work exist whether or not specific language is included in any publishing agreement.